


there's no better way to go home

by simplyprologue



Series: and i can see for miles, miles, miles [3]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Babies, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Post-RotJ
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-05
Updated: 2017-01-05
Packaged: 2018-09-14 23:52:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9210707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: All Jyn asks from the New Republic is for her family’s land on her mother’s homeworld to be restored to her, and a decommissioned VCX-100 light freighter. With a stroke of a pen, the Erso-Andors leave the Rebel Alliance for a place they might call home.





	

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** I wasn't going to write more babyfic, but I am me. So this happened. I recommend listening to "In the Dark," by Matt Woods, because it gives me all kinds of Rebelcaptain emotions. Good for both fix-it scenarios and canon compliance. Title is taken from aforementioned song, which hurt me particularly with this verse and chorus:
> 
> Now the waters are the open sea  
> They're inviting me in  
> Till the waves are crashing over me  
> Then I forget how to swim  
> Like lord  
> I just died in your arms  
> There's no better way to go home  
> I just died in your arms  
> And I thought you should know that 
> 
> You don't have to save me every time  
> Just leave me in the dark  
> You don't have to save me every time  
> Let me lose my heart, my heart, my heart

Aria Prime is a small aquatic world in the Middle Rim, far from any geopolitical chokepoints or resource-rich planets. Far out of the way of hyperspace lanes, populated by fewer than three million people, it’s a world blue and drowsy, with emerald climbs cloaked with mist and calm oceans filled with fish. Rivers form deltas rich with silt, with red mud on the banks that dries in the warm months that give way to a short planting season of three standard months. There's soil that sprouts tubers and root vegetables, grows tall grass to feed the bantha before the landscape turns white and wet in the cold months, the shivering sea battering the cliffs, but never quite freezing. The air tastes like a salt lick, or damp moss, but never quite like sunlight.

Jyn wonders if her Mama and Papa chose to hide Lah’mu for it’s resemblance to Aria Prime.

The Rebel Alliance reforms itself into the New Republic, and Leia asks Jyn if there is anything she would like as recompense for her service. Between the two of them, she and Cassian are owed at least twelve years of backpay — but all Jyn asks for is for her family’s land on her mother’s homeworld to be restored to her, and a decommissioned VCX-100 light freighter. Then, after a moment of hesitation, requests a contraband K2 unit.

With the stroke of a pen, she’s granted all three.

 

 

They offered passage to the others, to whichever world they’d like. But Chirrut is content to pledge himself to Luke Skywalker’s new Jedi Order, and Baze is obligated to attend to his husband, or at the least, is obligated to be exasperated by him. Bodhi has re-enlisted with the New Republic Army for a term of three years, and is set to remain on Coruscant. And while they are not among the first to leave, there are many set on seeing the war through to the total annihilation of the Imperial fleet.

“We’re not fighter pilots,” she said, and shrugged. “And it’s not like they’re hiding,” he explained, reporting his retirement.

For now, it’s the three of them, charting a course through space.

Jyn walks the catwalk, Galen on one hip and a blaster on the other. Her son curls into her, his face pressed into the juncture of her neck and shoulder. Humming tunelessly, she brings one of his hands — fisted around her pointer finger — to her lips, kissing it. Down below, Cassian curses quietly as their Astromech droid reads out more things wrong with the compressor. She would be down there helping, if young sir hadn’t woken up from his nap an hour earlier than usual, and screaming.

Still whimpering under the cover of his blanket, he’s stopped crying at least.

Besides, Jyn’s not sure what “help” she would be besides occasionally handing Cassian the wrong spanner and asking if the hyperdrive gave out because Han Solo, at some point, was aboard the ship. Her aptitude has always been with weapons and dead drops, not spacecraft.

So here she is, pacing back and forth keeping a wary eye out the viewports.  

They have more petty threats to contend with these days, pirates instead of Imperial cruisers. And while Jyn has no doubt that the repeating cannon in the blaster turret of this freighter — if not the blaster gun strapped to her thigh, as a last measure, but she’d rather not be firing it with the baby in her arms — could overcome any slapdash criminal ship, they have a son now. They’ve staked more on him than just survival.

 

 

_“How did you know you could do it?” Leia asked her, watching Ben sleep cradled in her arms._

_Jyn imagined that Leia thought she would have her mother here, for this, a notion that Jyn watched die in front of her young. She bit her lip, thinking of when Galen was first placed on her chest and the horizon unfolded in front of her, unyielding and unending._

_“I didn't. I still don't. But you start with holding your baby tight and realizing you'd die before you let someone hurt them and... you start there.”_

 

 

Cassian wipes his hand of grime on a rag, throwing it into the trash chute as he walks into the mess, cautious and quiet in his gait as two decades of habit have ingrained into him. On the range is a pot of bubbling stew — his wife’s idea of cooking is dumping a ration of protein into insta-bread, so he was responsible for starting it earlier in day — and Jyn stands in front of it, spoon in hand as she stirs. Music is playing on the transceiver, and she’s singing along and getting half the lyrics wrong, swaying in time to keep Galen from fussing.

It’s the sort of domesticity he’s only ever seen on propaganda posters.

“Do we have the right part for the repair?” she asks, once she notices him, but doesn’t stop her odd half-dance.

He leans on the hatch, crossing his arms. “We do.”

“Do you need my help?”

Nodding, he pushes off. “It’s a two man job. We can do it once we put him down for the night. Should put us back on track.”

Pulled towards them — objects in space, each with their own gravity and after so many years of serving in different armies of the Alliance he falls into his family’s orbit gladly — he stands behind Jyn, tracing his finger down the round of Galen’s cheek. The boy, preoccupied with his hand in his mouth, looks up at him with big brown eyes and then reaches up over Jyn’s shoulders.

“Do you want Papa, love?” she asks.

“Is he settled now?” Cassian asks, lifting Galen against him. “Was he sick?”

He presses his lips to his son’s forehead, but the skin is only pleasantly warm. Galen burbles something, swatting his hands against Cassian’s shoulders. The music playing on the transceiver picks up, and even though this corner of the black doesn’t get the best reception over the HoloNet, it doesn’t stop him from dancing with his son.

“I think it’s the disruption,” she answers, looking back, an eyebrow arching playfully. “Babies and schedules and all of that. He hasn’t been out of atmo since he was born, now we’ve put him in a big scary spaceship.”

Galen seems less perturbed by it now, his cherubic face split by a grin.

Leaving the spoon across the top of the pot, Jyn leaves their dinner to simmer on low, resting against the counter — keen on watching _her boys_ as she’s told him more than once, a sentiment that’s sticky in the back of his throat and makes it hard for him to swallow. Instead, he shifts Galen onto his forearm and offers his hand to her. She looks at it for a moment, then rests her fingers atop his palm.

He tugs her into them, laughing as she tries to stop herself from tripping over her own feet. Jyn doesn’t dance, just like she doesn’t join rebellions and doesn’t know how to be a mother. With a sigh, she tilts her head, a happy askance expression on her face. Warmth blossoms in his chest. one of those peculiar feelings that he catalogues as _content_ or _fulfilled._ Galen laughs, a shrieking sound made with no care nor restraint — and after years of being unyielding, years spent without relent, Cassian can laugh, and smile. He is no longer responsible for the Rebellion’s most precious secrets, the most important missions. A scream of happiness from a child no longer sets him on alert, waiting for a Stormtrooper’s baton to come down on his skull.

It’s moments like these, waltzing his wife around the mess with their son between them, music crackling in the air — he wants to take it all and bottle up, put it on a shelf to admire for the next time the Galaxy loses its mind.

“What do you think is going on up in Papa’s head, Galen?”

He smiles. “Nothing of interest, I promise you.”

Hope dictates that he lives in these moments.

 

 

_He walked the length of the hanger with Galen tucked inside his jacket. Gone for days in the Outer Rim on a mission that took less time than it took to travel to the blasted waste of a world, he returned to Home One to find Jyn dead on her feet in the command center, their son strapped to her chest._

_“I don’t remember my father,” he confessed to his son as they walked, Jyn asleep back in their quarters. “That is a bad thing to say — but I don’t, and I hope you don’t think poorly of me. But I promise to try my best.”_

_Children are resilient. He traced the soft lines of his son’s skull, unfused fontenelle. Cassian does not want his son to learn about the ways children are resilient._

_The first step, he thought, was to raise him far from a military fleet._

 

 

Galen’s favorite blanket is one that Bodhi knitted from scraps of repurposed wool. _Blue_ , he said, pushing the brown paper-wrapped package into her hands. _I remember that Galen — that your father, he one time said you liked blue. So I tried to find a lot of blue._ It’s a beautiful blanket, hues of military navy and bleached sky, faded turquoise and a shade of cobalt she remembers from the upholstery of a commandeered shuttle.

The baby nurses himself back to sleep.

Other mothers on base warned her to not let him do it, but Jyn can’t bring herself to deprive him of any comfort she can give him. His cheeks are chubby, his thighs have rolls, and she spent too many months in her own childhood starving for food and love to keep anything from Galen.

Cassian appears in the doorway, watching them silently. “It’s finished.”

Holding out her free arm in tacit invitation, she shuffles to the back of the bunk. He nods, toeing off his boots.

”We can make the jump to hyperspace once we’ve slept. I’ve checked the deflector shields and put us on autopilot for now.” They both look at the chrono, and wince. They’re nearly a day off-course for Aria Prime.  He eases himself down into the bunk, arranging himself around Galen, sleepy and milk-drunk and Cassian cannot even imagine what goes on in his son’s dreams, but he smiles and it breaks his heart. Jyn pillows her head on his bicep, looking up at him. “I would ask if you needed anything, but I should have done that before I got into bed.”

“Most likely,” she murmurs.

“Do you need anything?”

Letting her own eyes fall closed, she shakes her head. “No.”

She tries to conjure up some scrap of a memory from Aria Prime, but in truth she does not know if her parents ever took her to visit her maternal family. Or rather, if they were ever permitted to. All Jyn knows of her mother’s homeworld are from deluged days on Lah’mu, when she would ask her mother questions about when she was a girl. _Emerald climbs cloaked in mist. The taste of salt in the air. My own mother’s cooking, hearty meals with mashed root and braised meats._ Her own childhood is nothing to be repeated, but her mother spoke so fondly, yearned so much for Aria Prime.

Pressing his lips to her crown, Cassian settles in beside her, and she knows what he’s thinking.

Not due to any particular talent, but because they’ve discussed it before. Hushed whispers, choked words. If they die in each other’s arms in their sleep, they wake up in each other’s arms. It’s the easiest way to leave Scarif, each day a stolen miracle wagered on borrowed time. Except now—

They’ve cashed out.

“Take the credits and run, love,” she murmurs, slitting her eyes open.

He chuckles into her hair, answering her with something in Festian, and if she were more awake she’d try to parse the words to translate them into Basic. Instead she burrows her face into his arm, trusting him to get Galen back into his crib when he’s asleep.

 

 

They’re cleared to land using Republic codes, after five years of covert missions on stolen shuttles or simply battering their way past Imperial shields. They are battle-tested and battle-ready, and have no battles left to fight and neither knows how many years it will take to stand down.

Cassian puts the freighter down in an overgrown field, and like a child Jyn presses her hands to the glass, looking for the first time at the place where her mother grew up. The Kyber crystal, as much a part of her as a finger or her nose, bites into the meat of her hand as she tugs at it. _I’m home, I’m home. We’re home._ There’s a building to the west, they saw it as they flew over. It may be derelict by now — she cannot truthfully say when her grandmother died, if it was before or after her mother — but she cannot find it within her to care. It has her name on it.

It’s _theirs._

It’s the wet season, and cold, and Cassian zippers Galen into his parka with him before they disembark.

They peel boards that crumble from rot away from the front door. Jyn’s heart hammers against her breast; looking helplessly at Cassian, she pushes it open.

 

 

Inside is sparse. Picked-over, as though others — other unnamed relations she’s never met, or friends — had gotten there first, taken what they’d liked, and sealed the rest up tight. The air is stale, and holding a squirming Galen in his grasp, Cassian opens windows to bring in the wind off the sea.

Squinting, Jyn pulls curtains down, letting in the light.

They take stock — a large kitchen, a trestle table nestled into a dining alcove. A large parlor that branches off into a hall. Fingers skimming along the wall, catching on the frames of photographs and pressed flowers, Jyn counts three bedrooms.

One for her and Cassian. One for Galen. One for — _Baze, Chirrut, Bodhi, Kaytoo, once they get him operational, another child_ — whatever suits their purposes.

“Jyn?” Cassian calls.

She tries the electricity, to no avail. They’ll need to locate the generator. Her boots scuff on the floor as she walks slowly back into the parlor, looking at the desaturated faces of strangers behind glass.

“Do you think that’s Mama, when she was a baby?” she hears him ask Galen in a light tone, airy and half-uncertain, like no one ever taught him how to be gentle. (No one did, but she thinks he does a fair job of it.) “And that might be her Mama, and that’s her Papa, sitting next to them — Jyn, look at this.”

Her heart takes flight to her throat.

She doesn’t have any pictures of her parents.

Except now she does.

 

 

They spend the first night in a nest on the floor, a fire roaring in the hearth. Rain splatters down the chimney, and they put it on their list of repairs. Galen sleeps between them, his chest rising and falling under their palms in turn.

They kiss, and see the rest of their lives on the horizon.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! All comments and kudos are very much appreciated. I'm on tumblr as ofhouseadama, if you wish to visit me over there.


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